I recently started up a new Marvel Heroic Roleplaying event. So far it is most of the cast of Nextwave (and Speedball on the New Warrior exchange program) exploring the events of Cullen Bunn’s Fearless Defenders.

I knew going in that I was going to have to give them an “awesome” vehicle just like the Shockwave Rider, but I wanted to create it with my players so they really felt like it was their own.

I gave them the premise that they were “borrowing” a prototype aircraft from the Beyond Corporation’s hangar, and asked them a few questions about it. Here are their questions, complete with the answers provided. Read the rest of this entry »

I have found that Ryan T. Goodman’s event “The Tape” based on Matt Fraction and Javier Pulido’s Hawkeye #4-5, makes a great one-shot! In preparing to run the event I wanted to include a focused team of characters for players to choose from.

For the characters who don’t have official datafiles, I was able to find great write ups online, but wanted to make them as similar as possible to the official printer friendly datafiles to avoid any confusion for people who had never seen the system before.

After the too early death of our original Annihilation campaign, Rob decided to start a new cosmic-themed campaign with new characters. Apparently, I have a thing for Nextwave members, since my character choice this time was Machine Man, AKA X-51/Aaron Stack. Machine Man was on my short list for the original Annihilation game but was dropped when Rob suggested that I play a female character in a Marvel game for once.

Much like Tabitha, Machine Man has a peculiar Power setup – one power set and piles of relatively small power dice. The real focus of his datafile is the combination of the SFXs Constructs and Multipower, and the Limit Exhausted (called Swiss-Army Fingers, Multitasking and Needs a Recharge in this particular Datafile). Figuring out how to maximize these isn’t intuitive, but can be highly rewarding once their potential is realized.

When Rob started his Civil War campaign last year, I had a hard time deciding on a character to play. I eventually decided that I wanted to “import” in a NPC from an Icons campaign that past summer and run an alternate version of that character who was native to the 616 universe.

Possession

You can take over someone else’s body, much like Mind Control, except your mind is “inside” the victim and controls their body, rather than issuing orders. Your own body is unconscious and immobile while you possess someone else. Otherwise, this power works just like Mind Control.

Since your mind is in control of the target’s body, you can spend your own Determination for tests you make using the possessed target (unlike Mind Control). If you place the target’s body in a life-threatening situation, you must make a Possession test against the target’s Willpower each round, with failure meaning the target shakes off your influence.

Mind Control notes that the target of must be within visual range.

There wasn’t a power in the Basic Game or the Civil War book that really emulated what Possession does. An evening was spent pulling apart other power sets to get something that functioned as closely to the Possession power as possible, which I have called Bodyswitching.

How Bodyswitching works is that the PC uses Mind Control to place a mind control complication on a target. Once the target’s complication goes above D12, the Player Character gains control of the Watcher Character instead of the Watcher Character being taken out. While controlling the Watcher Character, the Player Character has access to the Watcher Character’s Powers and Specialties. The power deactivates once the Watcher Character is dealt trauma or when the Player Character deactivates the power set.

Bodysurfing Watcher Characters is a whole lot of fun. It gets especially goofy when dealing with Arthrosians – if your Watcher plays them like a hive mind, mind controlling one means suddenly gaining a whole unit.

I didn’t intent to create back-to-back swordmen for Marvel, but it shook out that way. Here is Willard H. Wright from Umineko: When They Cry. Willard is a relatively minor character, not appearing until late in the series and, as such, not appearing in the anime adaptation of the first half.

This datafile is an experiment is building a custom datafile centered around D8s. Marvel doesn’t have a point-buy system and it’s easy to get carried away with custom files and create stat bloat. Willard is meant to be a starting level physical combatant with some specialties against mystical targets and some tricks to protect other heroes in combat.

Like other fans of Marvel Heroic, I started writing up non-Marvel character datafiles to speculate on how various characters from other media could fit in the system. While that is all fine and good, it’s only producing media for players. With the game now out of print, the biggest content hole is really in NPC Datafiles and related plot hooks. We’ve all been that lazy GM who wants to just grab some stat blocks, figure out how to make it all fit and run with an idea. Right now, that pool is large but finite.

It’s not hard to swap a PC’s statblock into an NPC statblock, but finding a home for the character in a plot can be slightly more difficult. As such, along with the Player Datafiles, I felt that should stat up NPC versions along with some suggested plot hooks.

Type-Moon’s interpretation of King Arthur has always interested me and, given that I already posted my PC version of the datafile, it seemed like a good place to start.